Go, Go, GO Firefox!

The best online source for browser usage stats today is showing that of their five quite diverse sources, the highest percentage reached by IE6 is just 79%. Seventy-nine!! That's down from almost 95% at the start of this year. And the reporting site itself, the fifth of the five sources, is seeing only 45% of users with the accursed browser. Hee hee!!

The Firefox marketing campaigns are working, people are starting to really get it, and the world is looking more and more beautiful every day.

My prediction is that Microsoft will be but a memory in thirty years... have I said that here already? They've got so many baskets, with so many eggs, but they aren't actually dominating in any of them. Sorry - except perhaps with Office, but even that is coming to the point now (surely!) at which development potential is limited, and improvements more and more tend to be merely cosmetic.

The silly old boys at Redmond did come up with a solution (and a good one, so they thought) in charging the earth every year for use of said software... however, they are silly, these old boys, and their idea -- as with all things Microsoftish -- came far too late.

So where do they go from here? They can keep buying up innovative companies and good ideas, but the problem is the fact that there is a dominant player in every market Microsoft has attempted to enter, and each with a product preferred by the public to the Redmond offering.

The most popular web server has always been Apache, with IIS claiming only 20-30% of that market. MS is trying to tout Windows Server 2003 as an application server, with SharePoint linking seamlessly into Office (of course), but who are they kidding? With IBM's WebsShere, BEA's WebLogic, JBoss, JRun, Sun Java Server, Oracle, Sybase, Zope and ColdFusion just some of the major names playing on that field, Microsoft is really just sitting on the sidelines.

And then there's the Playstation. Playstation rocks my world. Does anyone actually own an Xbox? I mean, anyone who doesn't also own a Playstation?

Give up Gatesy. We've got it covered!

Idiocy

After sporadic days of anguish spent on the previously mentioned Recent Docs list problem, I just did a quick Google for "windows MRU list missing" and found a MS KB article about the very thing.

Turns out it's a TweakUI setting. "Add document to Start Menu", which I'd turned off as I don't really use the Start Menu.

Duh.

Office Plays Bad

My "recent documents" list -- the ones that appear at the top of the Task Pane in MS Office apps -- has gone. Been a couple of weeks now, but today I (yet again, and yet again fruitlessly it seems) attempted to fix out the problem.

Went to Tools > Options > General... and the "Number of recent docs to keep..." option is actually greyed out now.

Why? Why? Why?

Spent the best part of today squinting through trillions of menu options, reinstalling, uninstalling, fresh installing, repairing, searching... going batty, basically. What on earth has caused this?!

Plurry Windows. Dying to get a shiny new G5 iMac... yum.

Be Wary of the Google Desktop

I know, I know, it's been ages. My apologies, and thanks for still reading, huh! Life has thrown me a series of curve-balls this year, as they say, and while I'm plodding on, some things have lapsed a little. However, I will always be back when there's something important to say!

And on that note: to today's entry. Franci Penov, (an MSDN developer, it must be noted, and quite possibly one of those working on MS's own, rival, "soon-to-be-released" version of Google's Desktop search) has prepared a fantastic list of reasons to worry about Google Desktop.

In brief -- it's doing things it shouldn't, and if you ask it to stop, it won't. Read the article for the rest, well worth a few minutes of your time.

And if you're in Melbourne tomorrow afternoon, come down to the St Kilda/Port Melbourne beach -- the dog beach at the end of Catani Gardens, specifically -- and look out for myself (in orange bikini) and my Jack X Foxie pooch, Magnus, and let us know what you think!